..
Fighti NeddyHis vulpine bro did something like sell tubes to hospitals to
tend to the dying who were always going off about colours and people from the past they never dealt with who gave them a hard time worthy of haunting them to the deathbed and vindicating their smartass siblings who spent parenthood warning incessantly about pitfalls like it were some sort of adventure game where you need to cover your tracks like an escapee lost in the bayou being starved out by the deputies. Neil, the first of four N brothers born to parents nick and nora made it one way and as it happened it was the way people liked to talk about positively.
People talked that way and they talked about Neil and later Norm and Nils. When people (the ambiguous term applied to the residents of Centralia, WA who lived in the mountains and worked everywhere) felt like talking in other ways, they were likely to make good on the stories and opinions derived from the life works of Nedd. Double-D for security. When he was older he used to draw fire from crayons and blow off soda froth like a bad night, chalking it up to slow sales at the joint he was smoking in; sales floored their way through the roof and everything was on the cusp, even business but morely the gut of its assistant manager, Double-D. Nedd had this burly look and the way his belly hung evenly about his studded belt like conical water over the rise of a chilled glass (nothing but chilled glasses): prototypical. He was the kind of assistant manager that people told I can’t believe stories about. Like the time he attacked (and killed) a dear with a hatchet and threw the torn antlers into his veggie patch as a message to the doe that was eating his snow peas. He didn’t understand snow peas. They weren’t growing. The punchline was “in january”. Or the time in community college when he started a rolling service.
Anyways, as time went on Nedd became charity werk for his family, who really had nothing to offer in the way of life. It was this formality to visit and it went on and on and grew more and more detached and they usually ended up talking about luggage lines and airfares even though there was no flying going on outside of the inspiring paul newman movie that played on the gut emotions so forget that what they talked about begged to be trivial but instead it was trying and for that further futile. No class. Neither parties could give the fushits about what happened in the between time then didn’t ask either so it left the 13 day off-time liberal. But liberal is wrong because time can’t be liberal if its purveyors are insipid. But Nedd made the time good for other people to talk about. When he was in the present tense he would always get confrontational over really petty things, like change at the hardware stores. This was the basis for his hatred of Canadians and their trite coin. He worked at a hardware store and got all the young employees pregnant but not directly he hated that kind of stuff but he liked to pair people up and lacked the foresight to compensate for the instincts of his male friends and the innocence of his female employees who spent most of the time borrowing cigarettes and collecting commitments for the blood drive. He oversaw his empire and assailed all that thought they were doing otherwise. This abstract theory about all being subjects to the other persons empire and that the empire
was expanding as his friends was retreating to form an island nation safe form the oppression of his greater cause. Whatnever.
The climax is Fighti Neddy (so dubbed by hack lit/culturalists that moonlighted as friends) on a hiking trail on a weekend trip away in the cascades dealing with mud and hunger but not admitting the latter and gnawing the straw on his thermos to a skinny butte and calling his friend Marcienalcholda over to hold the buttons of his shirt which has been popping off breaking his beau belly from its personal barriers. They got to confronting a bear and Nedd brought out his fists and then his brass knuckles and bloodied and eventually slaughtered a bear with his fists. The punchline was an endangered cub dead on the night news and Nedd in handcuffs being laughed at back home by people interviewed just an hour earlier describing him as a very tired and flamboyant man who had a flare for fashion and figure skating and always like to argue down to the penny and once dyed his beard. It got edited down to “tired figure argued, died.”
The end of the peel...
... unfair revenge is at least funny
